What we know today, Thursday December 30
More than 17,000 new COVID-19 cases were recorded in NSW and Victoria overnight, with another 14 deaths.
- More than 17,000 new cases in NSW, Victoria
- Epstein associate found guilty in sexual abuse trial
- SA school reopening timetable under discussion as cases surge
- Omicron driving SA cases and hospitalisations
- Tours of historic ship suspended due to COVID risk
- Omicron and Delta creating a “tsunami of cases”
- England Test team “worst-performing” to tour Australia
More than 17,000 new cases in NSW, Victoria
NSW has reported another 12,000 cases while Victoria’s case numbers jumped by 1300 to 5137 overnight.
The number of active Victorian coronavirus cases has grown to 23,833 and 81,093 people were tested in the latest 24-hour period.
On Wednesday the state recorded 3767 new cases and had 19,994 active cases.
Another 13 people died and there are 55 people with the virus in intensive care, with 395 in hospital and a seven-day hospitalisation average of 378.
However, there are fewer people on ventilators – 23 on Thursday, down from 28 on Wednesday and 33 on Tuesday.
Victoria’s COVID testing ability continues to struggle under the strain of the caseload, with multiple testing sites again closing because they reached capacity by early Thursday morning.
NSW reported one more death and there are now 746 COVID patients in hospital, including 63 in intensive care.
On Wednesday, NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant warned “there is probably more disease in the community than the numbers reflect” as testing laboratories clear backlogs.
The daily caseload hit 11,201 new infections on Wednesday – up more than 5000 on the previous day’s 6062 – along with three deaths.
The spiking case numbers follow NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard’s December 15 warning that modelling suggested “by the end of January, we could be looking at 25,000 cases of the virus every single day”.
Epstein associate found guilty in sexual abuse trial
Ghislaine Maxwell has been found guilty by a US jury of helping the late financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse teenage girls, sealing a remarkable fall from grace for the British socialite.
Maxwell, 60, was accused of recruiting and grooming four teenagers for Epstein between 1994 and 2004. Her former boyfriend Epstein took his own life in 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on sex abuse charges of his own.
She was convicted on five of six counts. After the verdict was read, Maxwell pulled down her face mask and poured herself a glass of water.
Along with the trials of movie producer Harvey Weinstein and singer R. Kelly, Maxwell’s case is among the highest-profile trials to take place in the wake of the MeToo movement, which encouraged women to speak out about sexual abuse by famous and powerful people.
During the trial’s closing arguments in federal court in Manhattan a prosecutor said Maxwell was Epstein’s “partner in crime”.
“Ghislaine Maxwell made her own choices. She committed crimes hand in hand with Jeffrey Epstein. She was a grown woman who knew exactly what she was doing,” Assistant US Attorney Alison Moe said.
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Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, applauded the verdict in a statement that said Maxwell was convicted of “one of the worst crimes imaginable.”
“The road to justice has been far too long,” his statement said.
“But, today, justice has been done. I want to commend the bravery of the girls – now grown women – who stepped out of the shadows and into the courtroom.”
Maxwell’s lawyers had argued she was being used as a scapegoat for Epstein and sought to portray the accounts of her four accusers as not credible, saying their memories had been corrupted over the decades and that they were motivated by money.
SA school reopening timetable under discussion as cases surge
SA Premier Steven Marshall says the scheduled return of students to South Australia’s schools on January 31 is being discussed at a top level today in the light of surging COVID-19 case numbers spurred by the Omicron variant.
Speaking early Thursday morning, Marshall said Education Minister John Gardner and Education Department head Rick Persse would today discuss the return of students and teachers to state schools for Term One.
Marshall this morning refused to guarantee schools would reopen as scheduled, telling ABC Radio Adelaide “I don’t want to speculate” about what the surge in SA case numbers meant for the state education system and whether students would stay home.
“We’ll take whatever action we can to protect our students and teachers,” he said.
Marshall also said he expected to announce a relief package for South Australian businesses hit by new COVID-19 restrictions after a national cabinet meeting today to discuss how to respond to the surging Omicron variant.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison called the emergency national cabinet meeting for Thursday, bringing the scheduled forum forward by a week.
It comes as Australia obliterated its previous daily COVID-19 infection record, and as states struggle with testing capacity and rising hospitalisations.
After SA cases jumped to 774 on Boxing Day, Marshall announced capacity limits for hospitality venues and gyms would be cut and household numbers reduced from 30 to 10 amid warnings the health system could be overwhelmed.
The restrictions were imposed so as to reduce the risk of “superspreader” events on New Year’s Eve and a surge in hospitalisations, with chief public health officer Professor Nicola Spurrier saying yesterday she urged people to stay at home rather than go out.
Marshall said this morning he would listen to recommendations arising from national cabinet but expected to announce some relief for local businesses this afternoon.
Rapid antigen testing and close contact definition will be among issues discussed at national cabinet, with close contact expected to be set at a threshold of four hours contact with a positive case within a household setting.
“We just can’t have everybody taken out of circulation because they just happen to be in a particular place at a particular time,” Scott Morrison said.
Chief medical officer Paul Kelly said the new guidelines focused on “the biggest risk”.
“We’ve seen a long wait for people to get their results. Frankly, if you have to wait for eight hours in a queue and then 72 to 96 hours to get a result, it’s not fulfilling any useful public health function and it’s delaying proper clinical care.”
There will also be a pivot from heavy reliance on PCR to rapid antigen tests.
Morrison said changes to how close contacts are handled would mean there would be a seven-day quarantine period which would end if the person posts a negative rapid antigen test on day six.
A second rapid antigen test would then be taken on day 12.
Morrison said the federal government is working on a funding arrangement with the states to provide rapid antigen tests for free, but states would remain in charge of the rollout in the same way as PCR tests.
“In other casual settings, it’s a matter of going off to the chemist,” he said.
Subsidies for rapid tests are yet to be confirmed.
“The treasurer and I are discussing … concessional access in the private market,” Morrison said.
“When you start providing tests through other methods, you need to be very clear about where and who.”
Both NSW and Victoria have ordered millions of the tests and already promised to provide them for free, but they won’t be available until the end of January.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese accused the prime minister of passing the buck on testing to the states.
“We have the NSW government trying to purchase rapid antigen tests that will be available, wait for it, at the end of January, when we have a crisis right now,” he said.
“We have businesses that are unable to open. We have people that are waiting day after day to get the results of the tests and we have some people who simply can’t get tested so they are just staying isolated.”
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Omicron driving SA cases and hospitalisations
Nearly 7000 people have now contracted COVID-19 since South Australia’s borders opened on November 23, with 81 per cent having the Omicron variant.
After another 1472 cases were recorded yesterday, SA Health says there are now 37 COVID patients in hospital, up from 17 on Sunday.
They include six children, three people in their twenties, six in their thirties, three in their forties, six in their fifties, four in their sixties, four in their seventies, one in their eighties and four in their nineties.
Four people are in intensive care, including one patient in their seventies, two in their sixties and one man in his thirties who has been ventilated for a number of days.
After yesterday’s figures jumped from the 995 recorded on Tuesday, Premier Steven Marshall announced all non-urgent elective surgery would be postponed and warned of a “very imminent and likely” jump in the number of hospitalisations.
Labor says the cancellation of much elective surgery and continued cases of ramping showed the hospital system was being “overwhelmed”.
“Steven Marshall promised he had readied the hospitals before he opened the border – it is becoming clearer every day that wasn’t true,” Opposition health spokesman Chris Picton said.
“The health system is clearly overwhelmed. Our health care heroes are trying their very best under extraordinary circumstances to protect us, but they can only do so much with the resources they are given.”
Tours of historic ship suspended due to COVID risk
Today is the last open day to visit the 1864 clipper ship City of Adelaide at Port Adelaide, with organisers suspending tours from Friday due to the Covid-19 risk to volunteer guides.
The ship is being restored at Dock 2 and is usually open for tours every day.
Organisers say thousands of visitors have seen inside the ship, which is now a key tourism attraction providing a living history experience.
“The work on the ship is important, but the safety of our team of volunteers, and our visitors, is more important. We will closely monitor the situation and hope to reopen soon,” said project director Peter Christopher.
Omicron and Delta creating a “tsunami of cases”
The simultaneous circulation of the Delta and Omicron variants of the coronavirus is creating a “tsunami of cases”, World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says.
“Delta and Omicrom are now twin threats driving up cases to record numbers, leading to spikes in hospitalisation and deaths,” Tedros told a news briefing on Wednesday.
“I am highly concerned that Omicron, being highly transmissible and spreading at the same time as Delta, is leading to a tsunami of cases.”
Tedros repeated his call for countries to share vaccines more equitably and warned that the emphasis on boosters in richer countries could leave poorer nations short of jabs.
He said the WHO was campaigning for every country to hit a target of 70 per cent vaccine coverage by the middle of 2022, which would help end the acute phase of the pandemic.
New Year’s Eve will mark the second anniversary of China alerting the WHO to 27 cases of “viral pneumonia” of unknown origin in the city of Wuhan.
More than 281 million people have since been reported to be infected by the novel coronavirus globally and more than five million have died, according to a Reuters tally.
England Test team “worst-performing” to tour Australia
Former Australia captain Ricky Ponting says England’s touring cricketers are the worst ever team to visit Australia.
Australia have guaranteed retention of the Ashes urn inside 12 days of cricket – England spent longer in quarantine before the start of the tour – after an innings-and-14-run win at Melbourne moved them into an unassailable 3-0 lead.
The tourists’ collapse to 68 all out in the second innings of the Boxing Day Test was labelled “embarrassing” by a couple of former players and Ponting believes many of their batters are not up to scratch at the highest level.
“I don’t think I’ve seen a worse-performing team in Australia than what I’ve seen over the last three games,” Ponting told cricket.com.au.
Ponting led Australia to a 5-0 victory during the 2006-07 Ashes campaign during which England lost by 277 runs, 206 runs, an innings and 99 runs, ten wickets, and six wickets.
He added: “Some of the English top-order batters that I’ve seen in the last couple of tours, without giving names, there’s some techniques there that I just know are not going to stand up at Test level.
“In challenging conditions and world-class bowlers up against sub-standard techniques, then you get what happened (at the MCG). What I’ve seen with their batting, they’re just simply not good enough.”
The fallout has started with speculation on the positions of captain Joe Root and head coach Chris Silverwood while there has been no lack of soul-searching about county cricket and whether it is producing players ready for Tests.
Ponting feels one solution could be to introduce the Kookaburra ball in the LV= Insurance County Championship, emulating how Australia adopted the Dukes in 2016-17 to help prepare their batters for the 2019 Ashes.
“We’ve been through this in Australia,” Ponting added. “You wind the clock back a few years ago when we had our struggles in England, we changed conditions, we changed the ball, we changed everything because we were poor in those conditions.
“England might need to have a look at how they can make their conditions more suitable to ours. They play well in England still but they don’t play well when they come here – so maybe they play more with the Kookaburra ball.
“Maybe they flatten the wickets out a little bit so there’s not as much swing and seam. It might be the exact same blip that (Australia) had to have three or four years ago.”
-With AAP and Reuters
